The Damned Thing
A frontier inquest tries to explain a mauling death, but the surviving witness insists the killer was a color the human eye cannot register.
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Classics
A frontier inquest tries to explain a mauling death, but the surviving witness insists the killer was a color the human eye cannot register.
Six stories bound by one nerve: a scrivener who stops complying, a slave ship whose captain isn't the one in charge, and a bell-maker crushed by the machine he built to replace him.
A married woman at a Gulf Coast resort learns to swim, takes a lover, and decides she would rather drown than keep belonging to anyone.
Hawthorne moves into a haunted-feeling Concord parsonage and fills it with twenty-five tales where science, faith, and craftsmanship all curdle into ruin.
A married bank clerk starts a Yalta fling to kill time and ends up trapped in the first real love of his life, with no idea how to live it.
The complete Maupassant story cycle opens with a prostitute saving a coach full of respectable French citizens from the Prussians, and closes with those same citizens eating in front of her while she starves and weeps.
A killer on the run, a kidnapped boy who refuses to leave, and a five-dollar divorce: twenty-four O. Henry stories bound by one rule, life spins on you the moment you think you have it figured out.
A broke American is handed an uncashable million-pound note as a rich man's bet and discovers that just carrying it, never spending it, is enough to buy him an entire life.
A prince locks a thousand nobles inside a walled abbey to outrun a plague, and the plague walks in anyway, dressed for the party.
A minor nobleman reads himself insane on chivalry romances, then rides out as a knight-errant to fight giants that turn out to be windmills.
A con man tours provincial Russia buying the legal identities of dead serfs off landowners who can't quite believe what they're being asked, and the scheme works because everyone around him is running a smaller version of the same fraud.
A nihilist doctor arrives to tear down every inherited belief in a Russian household, then dies from the one thing his science could not out-argue: a stray infection.
A foundling of unknown parentage is raised by a rich squire, disowned for his sins, and nearly destroyed by the belief he slept with his own mother, before a lawyer's confession clears him of everything but bad luck.
A ship's surgeon washes up among six-inch people, then giants, then flying scientists, then talking horses, and each stop makes him hate his own species a little more.
A shipwrecked Englishman spends twenty-eight years alone on an island, and the book is less about survival than about the account he keeps of it.
A teenage heir is sold into slavery by his own uncle, survives a shipwreck and a gun battle, then witnesses a real-life political assassination that puts a price on his head too.
A stranger in white stops Walter Hartright on a midnight road, and her resemblance to an heiress becomes the hinge of a plot to fake one woman's death and steal the other's identity.
A cursed yellow diamond disappears from a locked drawer on a country estate, and the detective solves it by drugging the prime suspect a second time to make him relive the crime.
A penniless schemer claws her way through English high society while her sweet, passive best friend gets used by everyone around her, and Thackeray refuses to give either of them a hero to marry.
A young idealist marries a dessicated scholar hoping to matter, and Eliot spends eight hundred pages showing how little any one life actually gets to choose.
A shepherd bankrupted by his own sheepdog spends years watching the woman he loves fall for a soldier's sword tricks and a landowner's obsession before both rivals destroy each other and she comes back to him.
A dairymaid descended from fallen nobility is ruined twice over, once by the man who wrongs her and once by the one who cannot forgive her for it.
A ship's officer abandons eight hundred pilgrims to a boat he believes is sinking, then spends the rest of his life trying to out-run the one second he failed himself.
Sinclair set out to indict wage slavery in the Chicago stockyards and instead triggered a meat-inspection law, because readers cared more about what was in the sausage than about the men grinding it.
A country girl trades poverty for a rich man's money, a rich man's money for stardom, and stardom for an empty rocking chair by the window.
A lawyer spends a lifetime failing to forget the Bohemian immigrant girl who taught him what the Nebraska prairie actually meant.
A rich, plain, unremarkable young woman falls for a handsome fortune hunter, and her father spends the rest of the book trying to prove he is right about it.
A beautiful, broke socialite spends a decade calculating the perfect marriage and loses everything one honest choice at a time.
A New York lawyer engaged to the perfect society bride falls for her disgraced, separated cousin, and learns the family customs he thought would protect him are the trap.
An idle English gentleman who happens to share a king's face gets drugged royalty, a kidnapped monarch, and a throne he was never supposed to sit on.
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